Before There Was Spam…

I can't decide whether I blurred his name and contact info to protect his privacy or because I didn't want to give him any free advertising.

Before there was spam, there were advertising circulars. My front door is a magnet for these things — every day, I find flyers for real estate agents, restaurants, dry cleaners, and home improvement services. Occasionally, I’ll see one for an optometrist or a dental clinic — so I really shouldn’t have been surprised when I got one from a gynecologist.

I could tell right away that this guy is better than my regular doctor, because his flyer offers a menu of “Specialties and Procedures” including several that my doctor has never mentioned (for example, she’s never once asked me if I’d like to have “Major Surgery”). So of course I decided to make an appointment.

I did have some misgivings, though. The silhouette of a pregnant woman on the left side of the flyer didn’t fill me with confidence. I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure that having skin that particular shade of green is not a sign of a healthy pregnancy. Also, her hands look kind of ghostly and skeletal, although I may be biased because my own hands are freakishly small.

So I did extensive research (okay, five minutes of googling) on this physician and found a detail he’d forgotten to mention: he’s currently on probation in California for a “misdemeanor count of sexual exploitation of a patient” (his defense to the criminal charge was that no one ever told him he wasn’t supposed to have sex with his patients). This raised a question about the “Specialties and Procedures” listed on the flyer: at first, I’d thought that “STD’s” meant that treating STDs was one of his specialties, but now I think he may have meant that transmitting STDs is one of his more common procedures. I should probably ask for clarification when I call for my appointment.

Haha! Like the naive fool I am, I figured most medical professionals would write prescriptions to cure gonorrhea. It never crossed my mind that some of them provided Rx’s to contract it, too! I learn something new every day! :)

It’s making me wonder if I should offer our outerspace overlords my administrative services, they’ll probably need to do a lot of cataloging of human specimins and I can help with the database upkeep. I’ll prepare my flyer later.

I can’t tell you how many times I turned completely green when I was pregnant. And how many times my husband would proposition me with the ol’ line, “Hey, honey…want me to reconstruct your pelvis tonight or do you have another headache?”

I got handed a flyer once that was hysterically funny. I wish I still had it. It was a Chinese man promising to enlarge penises etc with his special herbs. The mispellings and incorrect word use had us rolling around on the floor in tears.